Nineteenth-Century Science and Psychology's Rise

1. Nineteenth-Century Science and Psychology's Rise

2. The Supremacy of Germany and the Beginnings of Modern Psychology Psychological research, or psychology as a science, began in German universities during the nineteenth century because Germany was the only place where organized science existed, at least as we came to know it during the twentieth century. Until 1920 there were more psychological research publications in German than in any other language and German domination extended to the traditional sciences as well (Littman, p. 45). The position of leadership in science that Germany enjoyed owed to its university system and to its ensuring the mixture of research and teaching.

3. The German educational system featured self-perpetuating laboratories and research groups organized around the most eminent scientists of the time. Thus, leaders like Müller, Weber, Helmholtz, Brücke, and many others worked within the university structure and established research programs that continued over generations. This was not the case elsewhere in Europe or in America. Further, Germany established the first modern university, at Halle, in 1694.

4. The situation in the United States was deplorable. worse even than France And England. When Edward Thorndike was a student at Wesleyan University in the 1890s, the two physics texts were translations from French originals (Joncich, 1968, p. 67). Not only was America behind Europe in higher education, but it had no real universities until 1890. There were, of course, academies and colleges long before that time, but they were closely related to the church and were typically anti-scientific. Their philosophy was largely that of the Scottish School of Common Sense, a view which was not congenial to creative research and scholarship.

5. If one wanted training in science, philosophy, medicine, or even history, the best advice was to go to Germany - and go many did. College in general was not a valued institution in America until almost the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century interest actually declined; in 1838, one out of twelve hundred boys went to college and by 1869 only one in two thousand did so (Littman, p. 47). That speaks volumes for the value placed on a college education during that century.

6. By 1880 there were about 400 American graduate students in master's programs in America and about the same number in graduate doctoral programs in Austria and Germany. When the German-trained people returned, they brought with them the conviction that scholarship and research belonged in universities. Hence, the main features of the model of university education that we accept as “normal” were originally a unique aspect of the German system. Experimental psychology began in Germany because that was where science in general was growing.

7. Fechner and Psychophysics I was always open to the ideas of G. T. Fechner and have followed that thinker upon many important points. (Freud, 1935) ...the year 1987 was celebrated as a "Fechner Year." In the German-speaking countries alone, three international "Fechner Conferences" were organized (at Leipzig, Passau, and Bonn) and Division 26 of the American Psychological Association hailed Fechner as the "Columbus of the new psychology. (Scheerer, 1987, 197-202)

8. Weber's Discovery • holding/hefting weights: 1/30th and 1/40th In observing the disparity between things that are compared, we perceive not the difference between the things, but the ratio of this difference to the magnitude of the things compared. (Ibid., p. 64) If you hold two weights, one of 30 ounces and another of 29, the difference is felt as easily as is the difference between weights of 30 and 29 half-ounces or 30 and 29 drams (a dram is 1/8 oz). Yet the differences in the pairs of weights are an ounce, a half ounce, and an eighth of an ounce.

9. At the same time, we cannot distinguish weights of 33 and 34 ounces, even though the difference involved is large - eight times the difference in the 30/29 dram discrimination. This is because it is not the absolute values of weights that are important, but the ratio of the disparity and the heavier weight. This ratio is 1/30, so that we can discriminate easily a 29 and a 30-ounce weight, but cannot perceive a difference between a 39 and a 40-ounce weight or a 97 and a 100-ounce weight. The ratio in this last case is only 3/100, or 1/33.3. This is less than the minimum 1/30 that Weber found necessary. dR/R = K The R refers to the stimulus value, since Reiz means "stimulus," "charm," or "irritate" in German.

10. Weber showed the ratio to hold for other modalities as well. We can discriminate lengths of lines if they differ by a ratio of 1/100 of the longer line and trained musicians could discriminate differences in pitch of 1/322. We do not discriminate absolute differences among stimuli, we discriminate ratios, and that is a fact discussed as a part of common experience in every psychology textbook written during the last decades of the nineteenth cen­tury.

11. Fechner’s Amazing Life • He received an MD from the University of Leipzig • obtained a lectureship in physics when aged 23. • By the age of twenty-nine he had forty publications in physics. • The next year he devised the first practical method for measuring direct current and published 175 pieces in physics during subsequent years. • wrote humorous pieces, published under the pen name of "Dr. Mises." (“Beweiss, das der Mond aus Jodine besteht”).

13. Fechner was appointed a Professor of physics at the age of thirty-two and was, in Freud's words, "broken by success (“Scheitern am Erfolg”). • From age thirty-three to thirty-nine he was an exhausted man and finally collapsed entirely, living as a secluded invalid for three years. • Just prior to and during this period of depression and invalidism Fechner became obsessed with the idea of life after death - in 1836 he published DasBuchleinÜber das Leben nach dem Tod • became a philosophy professor. At age forty-seven he wrote the first monograph on the psychology of plants - Nanna, or the Soul of Plants.

14. Fechner's obsession was to show that mind and matter were but two aspects of a single underlying reality. If he could show how mind and matter are translatable one into the other, that would show that they were two aspects of the same thing. Many before and after Fechner held the same view - belief in a metaphysical monism and an epistemological dualism, but they did not share his fanatic ambition to convince others. The answer came to him on the fateful morning of October 22, 1860, while in bed.

15. Two volumes of data and argument were published as Elemente der Psychophysik in 1860, the year that the mind was subjected to measurement, despite Kant's and Herbart's denial of the possibility. For Fechner, the proof of the identity of mind and matter lie in the demonstration that mind may be calibrated - scaled in physical units. This was the purpose of the three original psychophysical methods that were used to collect the data that proved the Identity Hypothesis. The methods, familiar to every college student, were the method of ascending and descending limits, used to determine absolute thresholds, and the methods for assessing differential thresholds, the method of right and wrong cases and the method of average error.

16. Proving the Identity Hypothesis: Ingenuity Itself The steps Fechner used in his famous argument justifying the legitimacy of his methods are described clearly and in detail in Boring's classic work (Boring, 1950). I reproduce it in simplified and (necessarily) interpreted form. It is a clever argument that repays some consideration - it puzzled many people for many decades. Fechner assumed first that it is impossible to measure sensation (mental events) directly, since there is no basis for assigning numbers to felt sensations. But we can judge present/absent, equal, or more/less when considering sensations produced by specific stimuli or sets of stimuli. This means that our scaling must deal with confusions, or errors in judgments of present/absent, equal/more/less. The unit of mind must be a unit of error in judgment. And here comes the first trick.

17. Fechner referred to Weber's Law, not so called by Weber himself, treating it as a great universal law that is key to the measuring of mind. But how could this be? Weber's Law refers only to stimulation, stating that over wide ranges of stimulus values, the amount of change that we can just discriminate, that is just noticeably different, is a constant - dR/R = K has nothing to do with sensation. Or does it? Fechner seized on the notion that a just-noticeable difference, or jnd, is a mental entity. Further, he proposed that all jnds, within or among modalities, are subjectively equal.

18. The Form of the Psychophysical Function Fechner's method for scaling sensation was simplicity itself. First we set up Cartesian coordinates, with the vertical (Y-axis) axis divided into equal intervals, since that axis corresponds to sensation and sensation is to be measured in jnd units, already assumed to be subjectively equal. Hence, we have an equal-interval vertical scale of sensation. On the stimulus side, we begin by determining the threshold value for loudness of a tone (that is, air pressure, dB level). For ease of description, let us say that the jnd for the particular stimulus continuum and task that we are using is 1/2, a gigantic value. For any level of stimulus, an increase of 1/2 is necessary to be just noticeably different.

19. This means that we begin at the value that we found is at threshold level (felt 50% or 75% of the occasions that we present it, depending on how we define "threshold"). To find the first jnd, it follows that we will have to present a new stimulus that is 1 and 1/2 as strong as the threshold value, since our jnd is 1/2. That value, 1.5 times the threshold value, produces one unit of sensation, in Fechner's reckoning. To find the next jnd, we increase the strength of the stimulus until it is just noticeably different from the first jnd value (1.5T). Of course, this value will be 1 and 1/2 that value, or 1.5(1.5T). We continue, and continue to find that the rate of increase in stimulus strength increases by a ratio - Weber's Ratio - which in this case is 1/2.

20. The increase is exponential, meaning that it is described by stimulus value raised to some power. In this case, the power is one and a half. Fechner believed that such plots actually measured sensation and that the amount of sensation produced by each stimulus value had thus been scaled! Is that legitimate? It is only if the Y-axis is really an equal interval scale - if jnds are really subjectively equal. Are they? Fechner produced a strong argument that they are, since the functions that he usually found were not only exponential, but a particular kind of exponential function - they were logarithmic, the "log" being simple base 10. As Fechner put it: S = K log R.

21. Sensation is related to stimulation according to a function featuring a constant particular to the stimuli and the task used and the log value of the stimulus values used. That is mind measured, if Fechner was right. Consider his proof. Proof that jnds are Subjectively equal Fechner provided an illustration to convey the significance of what he had done; it was only a simple table of logarithms Excerpted in Herrnstein & Boring, Pp. 66-75). Number Logarithm 10 1.0000000 11 1.0413927 100 2.0000000 110 2.0413927 1000 3.0000000 1100 3.0413927

22. Notice that the series on the left is a set of pairs where the increase is 1 and 1/10 (1.1). If the jnd in a psychophysical task were 1/10, that would correspond to the pairs of numbers in that series. Increases of 1, 10, and 100 each produce one jnd, which Fechner maintained were subjectively equal. Mind and body are identical if it can be shown that one can legitimately translate one into the other - the trick is to trans­late units of mind into units of physical stimulation. His insight was to use the jnd as the unit of sensation (mind). He found that if we assume that jnds are subjectively equal, we can scale sensation by calculating stimulus values necessary to produce successive jnds. Once we have done that, we have a function that relates mind and body and we can determine the sensory value of any value of stimulus.

23. But are jnds subjectively equal? He found that the functions he obtained with many stimulus continua and many kinds of task was a simple logarithmic function. Such a function, by definition, involves equal log differences for equal ratio differences. If the log values correspond to sensation and the ratios to stimulation, he appears confirmed - jnds are (subjectively) equal. Or so he concluded.

24. But: • Stevens (1960) • Swets & Green (1966)

25. Helmholtz: The Scientist's Scientist No reader of this book will need to ask why I have dedicated it to Helmholtz...If it be objected that books should not be dedicated to the dead, the answer is that Helmholtz is not dead. The organism can predecease its intellect, and conversely. My dedication asserts Helmholtz's immortality - the kind of immortality that remains the unachievable aspiration of so many of us. (Boring, 1942, Pp. xi-xii)

27. born 1821 • government medical scholarship for training at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. • He became leader of a group whose members would powerfully influence the science of the nineteenth century. The group in­cluded Emil du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, and Karl Ludwig. • An early success came from his paper "On the Conservation of Energy," in which he showed vitalism unnecessary. • Associate Professor of Physiology at Königsberg. Then came world fame!

28. His next feat, bringing instant world fame, was the invention of the ophthalmoscope, a simple device that allowed one to look into the interior of the living human eye. • At the age of 30 he had revolutionized ophthalmology. "Ophthalmology was in darkness, God spoke, let Helmholtz be born - And there was light," expressed the gratitude of a toast-giver at the Ophthalmological Conference in Paris in 1867. • By 1850 Helmholtz determined, though crudely, the velocity of the neural impulse - or, more accurately, he determined that the impulse had a velocity and was not instantaneous. • Thus began mental chronometry, the analysis of reaction time that became popular in the late nineteenth century and was revived during the late twentieth century.

29. Helmholtz' Research in Vision and Audition After inventing the ophthalmoscope in 1850, at the age of 29, he conducted a series of experiments on color vision, as well as experiments on physiological acoustics. He published over 40 papers on vision and audition during the 1850s and 1860s. This includes his monumental Treatise on Physiological Optics in three volumes, the first in 1856 and the third in 1867, and his work on audition, Sensations of Tone (Tonempfindungen) in 1863. Translations of these works are still used by students of vision and audition. He also invented another device during this period - the ophthalometer, which allowed measurement of the images reflected from the anterior and the posterior surfaces of the lens. This allowed accurate measurement of the curvature of the lens surfaces, and thus, of the amount of accommodation of the lens; it is still a standard piece of laboratory equipment.

30. In 1855 he became Professor of Physiology and Anatomy at Bonn and in 1858 became Professor of Physiology at Heidelberg, where he established his Physiological Institute. There Wilhelm Wundt was assigned as his assistant for two years. Respect, but no deep friendship, developed between the two. Helmholtz' father and then his wife died in 1859, a year after he arrived at Heidelberg, and he was incapacitated for several months with headaches, fever, sleeplessness, and fainting spells. He recovered, spending his time in research in vision and audition, with his mother-in-law caring for his two children. After a bit more than a year, he married Anna von Mohl, which led to his introduction to the royal family, where he would become a favorite of the future Kaiser and Kaiserin.

31. At Heidelberg , Helmholtz researched the motions of violin strings, friction in fluids, the Arabic-Persian musical scale, properties of ice, electrical oscillations, and even treatment of hay fever (Warren & Warren, p. 11). And his masterworks on the hearing of tone and the last two volumes of his Optics were completed - all this between 1860 and 1869. He found the epistemological/psychological aspects of his work particularly tiring - for example, the "Perception of Sight" in the Optics. He suffered with migraine headaches that would stop his work for at least twenty-four hours. He went to places that offered cures and spent time walking through the Mont Blanc region.

32. When he recovered and had finished the third volume of the Optics, he turned more and more to physics and mathematics. Psychology is frustrating, as he wrote to his friend Karl Ludwig: For the time being I have laid physiological optics and psychology aside. I found that so much philosophizing eventually led to a certain demoralization, and made one's thoughts lax and vague; I must discipline myself awhile by experiment and mathematics, and then come back later to the Theory of Perception. (Warren & Warren, 1968, p. 12)

33. His final psychological work was a paper with N. Baxt in 1871 titled: "On the Time Necessary to Bring a Visual Impression to Consciousness," where a tachistoscope was used to show that the duration of exposure necessary for identification of an object depended on brightness, area, complexity, and familiarity. And a post-exposure masking field was used to extinguish afterimages. His research on perception ended there, but he had spent perhaps his best years, from 30 to 50, on that subject. He went to Berlin, where an Institute of Physics was built for him, in 1871.

34. Later Research His work from then on involved thermodynamics, chemistry (the electrical nature of bonding), meteorology, and electromagnetic theory, with his student Heinrich Hertz. In 1877 he became rector of the University of Berlin and was elevated to the nobility in 1882 by Wilhem I. In 1888 he became first president of the Physical Technical Institute at Charlottenberg, near Berlin. He traveled to America for the Electrical Congress in Chicago in 1893. On the return trip he evidently suffered one of his fainting spells and fell down a flight of stairs. He recovered from a great loss of blood slowly and in 1894 suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He remained semiconscious for two months and died on September 8, 1894.

35. If John Stuart Mill Were a Scientist In 1886 (Optics, Vol. 3 Helmholtz published a treatise on vision in which he emphasized the "empirical" viewpoint. He stressed the fact that what we see (or hear, etc.) is not the objective fact that it seems to be; nor need it correspond to the stimulus as coded on the receptive surface, such as the retina. Like John Stuart Mill, whom he praised, Helmholtz believed that we notice only a small part of what may be identified as objective stimulation. ...we are not in the habit of observing our sensations accurately, except as they are useful in allowing us to recognize external objects. On the contrary, we are wont to disregard all those parts of the sensations that are of no importance so far as external objects are concerned.

36. Early in our lives we learn that a given retinal image, sensations from our eye muscles, and the consequences when we raise our arm to touch tell us whether an object is near or far. This is not known by the infant, who may therefore try to touch the moon or to the adult who gains vision for the first time and feels that the scene is "touching my eyes" (Gregory, 1987; Hebb, 1949). But it is known to us, who have long ago learned what we may touch and what we may not. In perceiving an object-at-a-distance, we unconsciously respond to the host of cues that we have found to be reliable indices of distance; we make an unconscious inference, in Helmholtz's terms. See “Rubber Hand” on the website: http://www.geocities.com/malonejc2007